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If true, that sounds like the same thing that was pulled on Gov. Fife Symington. There was no there there in his short stint on the Western Savings and Loan board, so his real estate business was scoured for errors.

EXCLUSIVE: A senior Justice Department official demoted last week for concealing his meetings with the men behind the anti-Trump “dossier” had even closer ties to Fusion GPS, the firm responsible for the incendiary document, than have been disclosed, Fox News has confirmed: The official’s wife worked for Fusion GPS during the 2016 election.

Contacted by Fox News, investigators for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) confirmed that Nellie H. Ohr, wife of the demoted official, Bruce G. Ohr, worked for the opposition research firm last year. The precise nature of Mrs. Ohr’s duties – including whether she worked on the dossier – remains unclear but a review of her published works available online reveals Mrs. Ohr has written extensively on Russia-related subjects. HPSCI staff confirmed to Fox News that she was paid by Fusion GPS through the summer and fall of 2016.

Fusion GPS has attracted scrutiny because Republican lawmakers have spent the better part of this year investigating whether the dossier, which was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, served as the basis for the Justice Department and the FBI to obtain FISA surveillance last year on a Trump campaign adviser named Carter Page.

A person working at an oppo research firm having a spouse in the FBI looks like a huuuuuge red flag to me. It's like the a stock trader with a spouse on the board of a major publicly traded company.

Aside from that, assuming the investigation into Trump started in bad faith, that does nothing to diminish any real wrong-doing discovered. It will, however, have some serious repercussions for the intelligence community and of course, trust in the system. It's also a two-edged sword; The partisanship isn't likely to be one-sided.

Why is there suddenly a notion that racism is solely an American issue? Just because you're the 'best' at something doesn't mean you own it.

I didn't mean to be snarky, it was an honest question. The Wikipedia article does not mention anything in that regard, but of course, I don't expect Wikipedia to be the be-all-end-all of factually correct information. Keep in mind I am not a native speaker, and I was honestly curious whether this expression is racist or has acquired a racist tinge over the years. Because if it has, I will stop using it.

I've been saying to friends Trump has missed his opportunity to fire Mueller with the Flynn indictment. I guess the next best thing is to investigate him. If they need Rosenstein to sign off on that, good luck.

So, Mueller has the receipts and he didn't even need a subpoena to get them. I suppose that ups the chances multiple people lied to the FBI because they thought certain emails would be withheld on the basis of some type of executive privilege that wouldn't exist because he wasn't president during transition.

In the weeks after he became the Republican nominee on July 19, 2016, Donald Trump was warned that foreign adversaries, including Russia, would probably try to spy on and infiltrate his campaign, according to multiple government officials familiar with the matter.

The candidates were urged to alert the FBI about any suspicious overtures to their campaigns, the officials said.

Remember when they said Junior wasn't a politician and he couldn't have known better. Harder to sell that when the FBI ****ing warned you.

I'm increasingly concluding no actual conclusion occurred, though not for lack of effort on the part of the Russians. However, with all the sanction stuff that was in discussions, I wouldn't be surprised of there was some kind of quid pro quo at play. Manafort and Flynn certainly had their transactions they were working towards and I believe on Trump's side Cohen was trying to arrange something. And that's not taking into account if Trump has money tied up in Russia that makes him vulnerable.

@The Final Dakar
There is a tendency to make this discussion into a legal discussion, and it seems to me that for at least some the purpose is to protect Trump: if he didn’t do anything illegal, he didn’t do anything worthy of impeachment, right?

You may be right that when it comes to crimes there may not be enough evidence to convict anyone, and we should not soften the legal standards to punish something that is clearly immoral but doesn’t meet a legal definition of a crime. Perhaps there are enough degrees of separation between the Kremlin and whoever got the emails. Or there is no email that clearly states if you do A for me, I will do B. To me it is still amazing that Kushner and Trump Jr. have survived the disclosure of their meeting with the Russian lawyer and the accompanying email. Have you heard anyone calling for their resignation as advisors to the President? No way a Clinton White House or the Obama White House would have gotten away with that.

I think you misunderstand me. I do think there's a good chance Mueller finds crimes have been committed (I mean, isn't obstruction of justice all but guaranteed at this point?). What I don't think he'll find is direct coordination between the Russians and Trump to affect the election.

What the info we have now points to is them coordinating to remove sanctions ASAP for not entirely clear reasons (The reasons for Manafort and Flynn are more clear). I have a hard time believing this doesn't violate a law somewhere.

The White House turned over records this fall to special counsel Robert Mueller revealing that in the very first days of the Trump presidency, Don McGahn researched federal law dealing both with lying to federal investigators and with violations of the Logan Act, a centuries-old federal law that prohibits private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments, according to three people with direct knowledge of the confidential government documents.

The records that McGahn turned over to the special counsel, portions of which were read to this reporter, indicate he researched both statutes and warned Trump about Flynn’s possible violations.

McGahn conducted the analysis shortly after learning that Flynn, on Dec. 29, 2016 — while Barack Obama was still president — had counseled the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time, Sergey Kislyak, not to retaliate against U.S. economic sanctions imposed against Russia by the outgoing administration.

McGahn believed that Flynn, and possibly anyone who authorized or approved of such contacts, would be in potential violation of the Logan Act, according to two of the sources, both of whom work in the administration.

Assuming the sources are good, Jesus Christ. It's pretty bad when your own counsel is worried you broke the law.

@Chongo
You should give up on your obsession with Clinton, she didn‘t perjure herself. Nobody forced Flynn & Co to lie to the FBI, they didn‘t ask gotcha questions to get them on a technicality. All they did was tell the truth from the beginning. If they had any doubt, they should have consulted a lawyer. And they got off lightly. To see them as victims is a distortion of reality.

@Chongo
You should give up on your obsession with Clinton, she didn‘t perjure herself. Nobody forced Flynn & Co to lie to the FBI, they didn‘t ask gotcha questions to get them on a technicality. All they did was tell the truth from the beginning. If they had any doubt, they should have consulted a lawyer. And they got off lightly. To see them as victims is a distortion of reality.

Kinda hard when the interviewer does not put you under oath and does not record it. You don't need to lie when you have someone like Peter Strzok on you side. Mills and Abedin lied to him about their knowledge of the server and were not charged with lying to the FBI.

Personally, I'm uninterested in Hillary since I don't like her either. I would be interested in deleting the Electoral College - Hillary did win the vote. If she'd been sworn into a position to do more damage, I'd get more interested.

But Trump is the one doing the damage today. And there were Russians in the room. Also available any time over email or phone. The Russians certainly wanted to help Trump & Co break the law. The main questions are if anyone did, and if it can be proved. Lots of smoke so far, but I'd like to see the actual fire.

Kinda hard when the interviewer does not put you under oath and does not record it.

Dude, it's not hard: just tell the truth. “Hillary Clinton did it!” isn't a get-out-of-scandal-free card. She is being trotted out when convenient to distract from current scandals. She doesn't matter anymore, she lost the election. Just because you think Hillary Clinton didn't lie under oath because she wasn't put under oath or said “I don't recall.” when she was. (Isn't that a line she stole from Jeff Sessions?) In the worst case, it just shows how much smarter Clinton is than the people in the Trump campaign, transition team and administration. Although I don't think you need to be very smart here, just don't effing lie to the FBI.

Nobody was forced to lie to the FBI. These were not adolescents who were tricked into a confession or into lying to the FBI, Flynn is a former 3-star general for chrissakes. They all knew better and did it anyway. They could have had (and maybe had had) excellent legal counsel.

A decade ago, my lawyers questioned Trump under oath during a deposition in a libel case he filed against me for a biography I wrote, "TrumpNation." (Trump lost the case in 2011.) Trump had to acknowledge 30 times during that deposition that he had lied over the years about a wide range of issues: his ownership stake in a large Manhattan real estate development, the cost of a membership to one of his golf clubs, the size of the Trump Organization, his wealth, the rate for his speaking appearances, how many condos he had sold, the debt he owed, and whether he borrowed money from his family to stave off personal bankruptcy.

My favorite realization now that some in GOP are starting to discredit Mueller is the implication that since no one objected back in June it means they either thought Trump was not guilty or not dumb enough to get caught. Notice its once the Flynn indictment dropped that GOPersons started panicking.

My new conspiracy theory? We're gonna see Mueller take some scalps from people in congress. We have both people who were part of the transition who might be complicit plus this new attempt at obstruction through intimidation, smearing and distraction. I think a few people know their only way out is to get rid of Mueller (Hi Nunes).

Of course, a simpler answer is some see this as an opportunity to do a purge of the FBI and restock it with loyal partisans that would make sure this type of investigation would never happen again. A sort of Reichstag fire, if you will.

Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, writes in the Wall Street Journal that evidence abounds of the Trump campaign colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton.

But rather than providing evidence, he proves the opposite: Democrats have absolutely no proof of President Trump colluding with Russia. And Schiff harms himself and the country by making such wild claims. To see why, take Schiff’s points in turn.

Manafort, Papadopoulos, and Flynn

First, Schiff claims that because the probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller has led to charges, this must mean Mueller is on to something. Really? Paul Manafort was charged with crimes unrelated to his time as Trump’s campaign chair, and Manafort’s brief time as the campaign chair was only due to a lack of GOP operatives willing to work with Trump who understood the Byzantine process of a floor-fight at the Republican National Convention. As soon as Trump realized Manafort was problematic, he dropped him like a hot potato.

The charges against Manafort are related to him failing to disclose work for, and payments received by, foreign governments. Yes, this is a problem, but many in DC who violate this statute go unprosecuted. During the time in question—before Manafort was Trump campaign chair—Manafort was working with Tony Podesta, the brother of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. We are all patiently waiting for Democrat Tony Podesta, and many others who ran afoul of this law, to be charged.

George Papadopoulos, a 29-year-old, was made a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign in March 2016. At this time the Trump operation was desperate to show that Trump didn’t just get his opinions on world events from “the shows.” While in Europe, and after he was added to the Trump campaign, Papadopoulos met with a Russian “professor” on March 14, 2016. The professor introduced him to Vladimir Putin’s “niece,” and on April 26, 2016, the professor told Papadopoulos the Russian government had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of her emails.

Schiff assumes the professor was talking about the WikiLeaked emails from the Democratic National Committee. As the president would say: Wrong! In April 2016, news of the DNC email theft had not been made public, and everyone living in conservative-ville was focused on finding the 30,000 emails Hillary Clinton deleted from her home-brew server. This was because many believed finding these emails would show Clinton doing favors at the State Department in return for cash from foreign actors.

And while the professor, Papadopoulos, and Putin’s “niece” talked a lot about setting up high-level meetings between Trump and Putin, absolutely nothing came from this. Papadopoulos even proposed a meeting between Trump and Putin to the Trump campaign, and the Trump camp quickly shot this idea down.

Mueller charged Papadopoulos with lying to the FBI. The “lie” was that Papadopoulos told the FBI the first meeting with the professor had occurred before he was made a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign, when it occurred after he was made a foreign policy adviser. In truth, the meeting occurred after the Trump campaign had decided on Papadopoulos but before he had been officially announced.

You can be the judge on whether this was a prosecutorial gotcha, or whether Papadopoulos was purposefully lying to protect the president. Either way, as Andrew McCarthy has noted, the Papadopoulos indictment is exculpatory to President Trump, and not damning in the least bit—because the Trump campaign clearly rejected Papadopoulos’ proposals.

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn also pled guilty to lying to the FBI. The lie in question occurred during an interview that took place only four days after Trump took office. Flynn was interviewed by FBI agents, including Peter Strzok (whom we’ll get to later), at the behest of former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, an Obama holdover, who sought to nail Flynn for violating the Logan Act when he communicated with the Russian ambassador during the “transition” period after Trump’s election but before the inauguration.

The act basically says that anyone outside of the executive branch can’t influence the decisions of foreign powers. Flynn allegedly did this by asking the Russian ambassador, on December 22, 2016, to delay or vote against a U.N. Security Council resolution that would declare Israeli settlements illegal (the Obama administration was planning on abstaining from the vote rather than voting against, a first for U.S. policy), and by asking the same ambassador on December 29, 2016 to not “escalate” after the Obama administration imposed last-minute sanctions on Russia (Russia did in fact not escalate, possibly due to Flynn’s request). Schiff says that this amounts to Flynn “conspiring secretly” with the Russians.

Not only do we want incoming administrations to talk to foreign powers, and not only were Flynn’s conversations totally non-nefarious, but the Logan Act, signed into law by John Adams in 1799, has been flagrantly violated since its existence, violations have never been prosecuted, and there are serious doubts about the act’s constitutionality (a question that has never been directly examined by a court).

On top of this, Yates never should have seen Flynn’s side of the conversation without a warrant, as it should have been redacted since he is a U.S. citizen. Unmasking Flynn’s side was not illegal per se, but it was an abuse of power using a loophole that Congress needs to address. The leak of that Flynn phone call to the media, which was politically framed as nefarious when it was not, was flagrantly illegal.

Aside from using the Logan Act as the pretext for investigation, the other thing out-of-the-ordinary here was the foreign policy crap sandwich Obama was trying to hand Trump only weeks before the transition of power. Outgoing presidents aren’t supposed to make big changes like this before they shuffle out the door.

Instead of being a legitimate response to Russian meddling, the action against Russia could have been purposed to hype claims of major Russian election interference. Even more egregious, Democrat politicians, including prominent senators, had been calling for a prosecution based on the non-crime of a Logan Act violation throughout the election. Is it downright appalling that politicians would call out a target, and our prosecutorial powers would dutifully aim and shoot.

The Trump Jr. Meeting in Trump Tower

Schiff then claims that the Russians “followed up” the Papadopoulos meetings with “an approach to the highest levels of the campaign—the president’s son, son-in-law, and campaign manager—once again offering dirt on Mrs. Clinton as part of what was described as the “Russian government’s effort to help Mr. Trump.”

Schiff says the Trump campaign agreed to accept Russian help, and that when the Trump campaign was disappointed in what Russia offered during the meeting, Russia countered by delivering the stolen emails to WikiLeaks days later.

Baloney. The two Russians who met with the Trump team, Natalia Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin, didn’t offer dirt on Clinton but instead talked about their quest for a repeal of the Magnitsky Act during the meeting. That’s a law Congress passed to penalize Kremlin associates who had a hand in the death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. They were doing so while working with Fusion GPS, the same firm the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid to come up with “evidence” of Trump and Russia collusion.

Fusion GPS was behind the now-disproven stories about a secret server communicating with Russia in Trump Tower. Fusion GPS gave Democrats’ money to former British spook Chris Steele, who possibly gave the money to alleged or former Russian intelligence agents, who spun the stories that created the infamous Trump-Russia dossier—a document that claimed Trump was under Putin’s thumb due to blackmail that involved prostitutes performing abnormal sex acts in a Moscow hotel.

This dossier is likely what sparked the FBI and Department of Justice’s investigation of Trump in the first place, even though FBI number two McCabe just testified to Congress that the only thing that could be verified in the dossier was Carter Page’s trip to Moscow—something that was already public information before the dossier was written.

Back to the Trump Tower meeting, Fusion GPS head Glenn Simpson told Congress that he had no knowledge of the meeting, although he met Veselnitskaya both just before and immediately after the meeting occurred. To make things even more interesting, the only reason Veselnitskaya had the right to even be in the country at the time was due to a special entry request granted by the Obama DOJ.

Again, this was still days before the existence of any DNC email theft was made public. When a music promoter from the U.K. emailed Don Jr. to set up the meeting in Trump Tower, it is entirely possible that Don Jr. thought the promoter was referring to Hillary Clinton’s deleted 30,000 emails.

Here’s some news for the uninformed: no presidential campaign in the history of our country would have passed up the opportunity to get a hold of those missing emails. If anything, looking into these claims was a public service. If Hillary was elected, and a foreign government did have Hillary’s missing emails, she would be prone to the same blackmail that many, without evidence, are suggesting controls the actions of Donald Trump. Some say Trump Jr. should have gone to the FBI. This is the same “institution” that allowed those emails to be destroyed, no-questions-asked, in the first place. Uh-huh.

The So-Called Social Media Support

Schiff continues: “Days after the meeting in Trump Tower, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks announced receipt of the hacked DNC emails. The Russians also published stolen emails directly through their fictitious proxies, DC Leaks and Guccifer 2.0. At the same time, the Russians ramped up a massive social-media campaign using an extensive network of fake personas and accounts to help the Trump campaign, vilify Mrs. Clinton and sow general discord.”

First, there are good reasons to doubt that Guccifer 2.0 and DC Leaks were related to the theft of emails and documents that led to the WikiLeaks disclosure, and there is even evidence that the non-damaging information Guccifer 2.0 released was harvested internally (as a side note, everything Guccifer 2.0 released was also at the fingertips of Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s corrupt IT aid Imran Awan).

Second, Russia’s “massive” social media campaign amounted to about $200,000 spent between Google and Facebook, and 40 overtly pro-Trump Twitter accounts. This compares to the $90 million spent on social media advertising by the Trump campaign’s vaunted digital advertising operation. And most of the “Russian” Facebook ads ran in 2015, which, as Schiff surely knows, was not an election year.

Even the widespread narrative of Russia hacking state elections systems started to fall apart, and then went radio-silent. In general, we still don’t have conclusive evidence that Russia orchestrated a massive interference campaign during the 2016 election, despite the Russian election-hacking narrative being treated as gospel truth by the Democrats, Mueller, and the media.

Where Does the Evidence Lead, Then?

Schiff concludes: “To claim that these facts show no evidence of collusion requires a willingness to avoid seeing what is in plain sight…” Here’s what is in plain sight.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign, seeking to distract from her ethics troubles and the DNC’s mistreatment of Bernie Sanders, sought to blame Russia and the Trump campaign for the release of the DNC’s files by WikiLeaks. Crowdstrike, a private cybersecurity firm paid by Democrats, was the only party to examine the DNC’s server. The FBI was not allowed to, or did not want to, examine the server. This allowed the Clinton campaign to go into the Democrat National Convention and talk “Russia,” instead of talking about how poor Bernie was mistreated by corporatist Democrats.

Whether or not the DNC was hacked by Russia (the later phishing of the Podesta emails did credibly add to the narrative), Hillary Clinton and the DNC then paid Fusion GPS to tie Donald Trump to the alleged Russian hacking. Fusion GPS was also working directly for Russian interests at the time, to repeal an American law that was passed after the murder of an innocent man in Russian prison. In its work for the Clinton campaign, Fusion GPS used Democrats’ money to interview Russians who spun tales damaging to Trump.

The result of the “information” gained by Fusion GPS from alleged Russian intelligence agents—the Trump-Russia dossier—was scooped up by an all-too-willing FBI and Obama Justice Department, after even the media wouldn’t dare publicly touch it. Deputy associate attorney general Bruce Ohr, who reported directly to Yates, met with Steele, author of the dossier, before the election, and met with Fusion GPS’s Simpson after the election. Ohr’s wife, who has ties to the CIA, worked for Fusion GPS with the specific role of trying to connect the dots between Trump and Russia.

C-suite FBI agent Peter Strzok and other top officials at the FBI and DOJ—the same who had cleared Hillary Clinton, including by changing their assessment as to whether foreign actors accessed Clinton’s server, where an honest assessment would have been highly damaging to her political future—began to investigate Trump and his campaign before the election on the basis of a dossier that was totally unverified and rife with verifiable errors.

Strzok was later added to Mueller’s crack team of investigators. It is likely that these same FBI and DOJ officials even obtained a FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, or Trump campaign associates, based on the dossier paid for with Democrat money by Trump’s political opponents.

We could know for sure, but on the issue of the FISA warrant or warrants, and on many other issues, the FBI and DOJ are currently flipping Congress the bird, refusing to even testify or present the documents that Congress has requested. After stalling, the FBI finally released pre-election texts between Strzok and his mistress, where Strzok talks about the need for an “insurance policy” because ostensibly he, FBI number two McCabe, and others “can’t take [the] risk” of Trump getting elected.

We Are in Dangerous Territory

The really sad part of all this, aside from the absence of justice in our country, is how much all this is harming America. There are some very powerful people, organizations, and an entire political party so invested in the Trump-Russia collusion story that turning up only dead-ends would be a catastrophe to their pursuit and maintenance of power.

What’s more, if it turned out that the real collusion with Russia occurred on the Democratic side, and that the whole Trump and Russia collusion narrative was cooked up by a Democrat’s presidential campaign and a corrupted Justice Department and FBI, it would be an existential crisis for the media, the Democrats, and maybe even the federal bureaucracy. Even some Republicans would have something to lose if this were the case.

Because of this, we are in dangerous territory. Like an animal trapped in a corner, many who have pushed the collusion narrative will now do and say anything to survive. Former director of national intelligence James Clapper was just on CNN and literally claimed that Trump was Putin’s “asset.” It is only so long before talk like this, including the babble coming from the likes of “Morning Joe,” will prompt some mentally deranged person to violence. Indeed, this has already happened.

On the other side, some Trump voters, who have real concerns and have been ignored for years, won’t go silently into the night if the Democrats opt for impeachment without concrete proof of a crime. This certainly seems to be where the Mueller investigation is headed. In short, Schiff, and those like him, are pulling our country dangerously close to a ledge of division where we have been before, and dare not go again. Democrats and Republicans alike in Middle America would do well to keep a level head and try to remain as unified as possible going forward. If we don’t, nobody will.

RIP "The investigation is illegitimate because it was based on the fake dossier" angle. (Not that it mattered. If you receive a warrant based on bad intel that doesn't retroactively make real crimes found with it ok)

Also, bless that Aussie official. He did more to report possible Russian interference in2016 than the entire Trump campaign.

“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party,” Trump said in the statement.

wtf this idiot can't even deny things without bragging about unrelated things. To equate Steve Bannon to a low level staffer is laughable.

President Trump gave firm instructions in March to the White House’s top lawyer: stop the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, from recusing himself in the Justice Department’s investigation into whether Mr. Trump’s associates had helped a Russian campaign to disrupt the 2016 election.

Public pressure was building for Mr. Sessions, who had been a senior member of the Trump campaign, to step aside. But the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, carried out the president’s orders and lobbied Mr. Sessions to remain in charge of the inquiry, according to two people with knowledge of the episode.

Mr. McGahn was unsuccessful, and the president erupted in anger in front of numerous White House officials, saying he needed his attorney general to protect him.

Yeah, that could be construed as obstruction.

The special counsel has received handwritten notes from Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, Reince Priebus, showing that Mr. Trump talked to Mr. Priebus about how he had called Mr. Comey to urge him to say publicly that he was not under investigation. The president’s determination to fire Mr. Comey even led one White House lawyer to take the extraordinary step of misleading Mr. Trump about whether he had the authority to remove him.

The New York Times has also learned that four days before Mr. Comey was fired, one of Mr. Sessions’s aides asked a congressional staff member whether he had damaging information about Mr. Comey, part of an apparent effort to undermine the F.B.I. director. It was not clear whether Mr. Mueller’s investigators knew about this incident.

Mr. Trump’s frustrations with the inquiry erupted again about three weeks later, when Mr. Comey said publicly for the first time that the Justice Department and the F.B.I. were conducting an investigation into links between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia. Mr. Comey had told Mr. Trump in private that he was not personally under investigation, yet Mr. Comey infuriated Mr. Trump by refusing to answer a question about that at the hearing where he spoke publicly.

White House aides gave updates to Mr. Trump throughout, informing him of Mr. Comey’s refusal to publicly clear him. Mr. Trump unloaded on Mr. Sessions, who was at the White House that day. He criticized him for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, questioned his loyalty, and said he wanted to get rid of Mr. Comey. He repeated the refrain that the attorneys general for Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Obama had protected the White House.

In an interview with The Times last month, Mr. Trump said he believed that Mr. Holder had protected Mr. Obama.

“When you look at the I.R.S. scandal, when you look at the guns for whatever, when you look at all of the tremendous, aah, real problems they had, not made-up problems like Russian collusion, these were real problems,” Mr. Trump said. “When you look at the things that they did, and Holder protected the president. And I have great respect for that, I’ll be honest.”

He had decided he would fire Mr. Comey, and asked Mr. Miller to help put together a letter the president intended to send to Mr. Comey.

In interviews with The Times, White House officials have said the letter contained no references to Russia or the F.B.I.’s investigation. According to two people who have read it, however, the letter’s first sentence said the Russia investigation had been “fabricated and politically motivated.”